‘Anyone for a top-up?’ his father muttered.
‘Yeah,’ Spencer said malevolently. ‘I’ll have a top-up, old chap.’
‘No, you won’t,’ Sam said. ‘We’ve got to go. We’ve stayed too long. It’s been lovely. David—David? You come too, if you like. We’d like to see you.’
‘It’s been fucking great,’ Spencer said, to Alec. ‘But now I reckon it’s time to get on with some other stuff.’
Not ten feet away, Billa was obstinately telling Kitty that they’d got a roast leg of lamb for their supper, that she’d be welcome to join them, and Kitty thought that would be delightful, she thought it would be just perfect, as they concentrated their full attention on each other’s faces.
28.
Like timber dislodged by spring floods; like unmoored boats swept into the stream; like cast-off objects driven before the force of a renewed river, taking possession of a dried-up channel at the end of a hot Devon August; like the return of beasts to their place of spawning at the close of their season of youth; like all of that, the Bears turned and followed the scent back to the house in Hanmouth, upriver, along the country routes, speeding up, shedding their concerns as they went, flying in their Toyota Civics, their Ford Primeras, their VW Golf GTis, their Peugeots, their Fiats, their Ford Kas, their Jaguars, their Bentleys, in shades of royal blue and silver, and silver and white, and red and silver, and silver, silver, blue and silver, catching the evening light like trout turning in a stream. They had come from Ashreigney and Iddesleigh, Bishops Tawton and Bratton Fleming, from brown fat houses like mushrooms in moorland, from first-floor flats with peeling paint in Barnstaple, from town terraces in Cullompton, from Chittlehampton, Huish, from almshouses in Cheriton Fitzpaine and Clyst; from towns commended for a reredos, for a pub as old as the monarchy, for a manor-house carving of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and for King Charles I’s belief that if there was anything certain in this world, it was that rain was falling over Tavistock. They had put themselves in leather, in green combats, in jeans, in tartan shirts, in a red and blue kilt, in clean white underwear, in none at all, and with bottles at their side or in their pockets, large and green or thumb-sized and brown, they drove, in pairs and singly. Mick and Ali, Phil and Andy, and Adam and Blaise and Steve, who ran the garage in Barnstaple; men solid and beefy, men stout, men verging on the definitely fat, ninety kilos, a hundred kilos, a hundred and ten and twenty, men whose waking breath resembled a lady’s light snoring, and a couple of men who just liked that sort of thing. There was the son of Harry’s old gardener, and Charles and Robert and Kevin; and they drove fast, with Lady Gaga on the stereo. They were in a hurry because they had all heard about Steve’s mechanic, whom Steve had had twice over the desk in the back room of the garage. Whose name was Spencer. The CCTV watched them go along the roads, breaking the speed limit as they went.
They came along roads that ran along rivers, hardly thinking of the names of the floods and trickles; their county sent the rain water to this Channel or that, to the Bristol, to the English; the Dart with its salmon, the glimpse of the Erme, the Avon, the Lynn, the deep-hidden Tamar, the Torridge, the Tavy, the Taw. They saw them, they crossed them, they passed within two miles of them, unseeing and unthinking, not like people going to something, but like those fleeing a threat behind them. They feared, as adults do not, to be late; they thought and talked to each other, in their cars pelting in top gear, of sex, of men, of the evening to come. A mild heated confusion had already settled on most of the passengers and a couple of the drivers, who had drunk a beer, a glass of wine, had taken a pill, had snorted horse anaesthetic or the ground-up leaves of a South American plant, and now were talking nonsense about how and when in the process the leaves lost their green and turned to white. When they reached the borders of the larger town, they deliberately slowed, grew stately, in homage to the stately observing cameras; some even turned down the stereo as the houses about them thickened. They passed the ugly estates with their backs to the road where—some remarked—that little girl had lived, where her mother stole her away and lost her, perhaps for ever. And then the houses grew pretty, and Hanmouth turned into itself. Some of them noticed each other, arriving more or less simultaneously, all of them afraid of turning up late and missing whatever they had come for, and hooted and gave a manly thumbs-up. They had come from miles away, sometimes, the Bears, and they knew what they had come for.
‘It’s a fucking nightmare parking here,’ Mick said, plucking at his crotch, tight and hot in black leather. ‘Always has been. Always will be. It’ll be a ten-minute walk from that car park by the station, you wait and see.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Ali said from the passenger seat. ‘It’s not you they’ll be staring at.’ Because he was wearing a kilt in green camouflage material and, under his leather jacket, nothing but a harness of steel rings and leather straps. ‘Stop going on about the fucking parking.’
29.
Half an hour later, it was as if no party had ever taken place in Catherine and Alec’s flat. The guests had gone, and could be seen to have trodden like cats through the furniture, the drink, the food; nothing was disturbed, nothing was moved, nothing was knocked over. The scrupulous new carpet—still giving off a faint metallic odour of the showroom and the carpet fitter—bore the marks of its vacuuming. The guests had been neat in their eating, and no crumb or spillage had fallen anywhere to show that anyone had visited at all. Alec had been good with the cloth and with the bottles, removing and stacking as the party had gone on; and now, as the four of them waved the last guests off, they returned to a smokeless, unstained, well-ordered room, more ready to hold a party than anything else.
‘Goodbye, Marian,’ Catherine was saying. ‘Goodbye, Isobel. Oh, yes—mustn’t forget—goodbye, Poppet, yes, goodbye to you too…’
‘Know more about Bedlington terriers than I ever thought I would,’ Alec was saying in the sitting room, busying about. ‘Could go on Mastermind. Specialist subject.’
‘Extraordinary, bringing their dog to a party,’ David said. ‘I don’t see why they couldn’t leave it at home for half an hour.’
‘Bloody thing,’ Alec said. ‘I must have tripped over it half a dozen times. You hear it yapping in the stairwell in the mornings.’
‘It makes your eyes hurt when you’re in the same room as it, yapping like that.’
‘I saw you give it a good kick, David,’ Alec said. ‘Well done, that man.’
‘I thought no one was looking,’ David said, sniggering.
That was a nice moment of companionship between father and son, agreeing about Bedlingtons. Then it passed, and Alec went back into the kitchen.
‘In Italy,’ Mauro said, turning round from the window, ‘nobody brings their dog to a party if it can’t behave. Maybe not even then. I never saw a dog at a party, running round like that. That’s what we say, the English, they love their dog, they have it instead of sex.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘Hey, David,’ Mauro said. ‘Did you have some of that stuff? It’s good stuff, that. I don’t know you can get such good stuff here. I’ll come again.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ David said. ‘No one offered me.’
‘Well, you only have to ask,’ Mauro said. ‘I think you’re crazy. When are we going to their party? Can we go soon?’
‘Well, that was nice,’ Catherine said, coming back in. ‘And we did only say from six to eight, and it’s nice that people don’t hang around for hours afterwards. They came when they were asked and they went before we got bored with them. Did you meet some nice people, Mauro?’
‘Yes, very nice, very nice,’ Mauro said.
Alec stood in the kitchen doorway. He had put on his nipple-tassel pinny over his best shirt and his cavalry twill trousers. Behind him, the two dozen glasses, clouded, obscured, lipstick-edged, still half- or quarter-filled with champagne, stood in three neat rows above the dishwasher like an improvised and reprehensible musical instrument; Alec could have
been about to play ‘Edelweiss’ on them. ‘Have I got the lot?’ he murmured, but this had not been a party inclined to smash glasses, even by accident, even considering Spencer, and he went back to his domestic task.
‘Yes, those funny boys,’ Catherine said, and she involuntarily looked about her at her objects, her bibelots, her table-top treasures. As well she might—but David looked, and even the little jewelled bird was there still. ‘We don’t really know them, I suppose, though I’ve often exchanged a few words with Sam. He runs the little cheese shop. I bought some of that brown cheese no one’s tried from there. I do think it’s important to support local businesses in ways like that. And his friend, his partner, Harry, seems awfully nice. Do you know he’s a lord? Not a proper lord, not one that sits in the House of Lords, not that they do any more, but someone’s son, someone important, he’s called Lord Henry something. You’d never know. Perfectly nice, very ordinary, no trouble at all, not pompous, no side to him.’
Catherine was going on talking as if to fend something off, to delay the moment. Was it Spencer—was something going to be said about that impossible and, now he had departed, unimaginable appearance? Among the Bedlington-fanciers and military widows, the shy and unadvised men with clothes ambitiously posher than their weak and even somewhat silly faces, Spencer had come in with his tight-clad body canted backwards like a model and his sleepy, lecherous glare under unkempt hair and blond eyebrows. He had seemed like a mistake, a delivery for downstairs, a party changeling whose true identity had been uncovered too late. But he had been in the right place after all; he and Mauro had gone towards each other like elementary principles in a physics experiment, hand drawn to arse. They could not have helped themselves.
‘They’re having a little party themselves tonight,’ David found himself saying. ‘Harry and Sam. They asked us if we’d like to go over a little later.’
‘That was nice of them,’ Alec called from the kitchen. ‘I don’t know that I really feel up to it, though.’
‘David didn’t mean us when he said “us”,’ Catherine said. ‘He meant that Harry and Sam had asked them, David and Mauro, to go over.’
‘Not very polite,’ Alec said. ‘Are you sure they didn’t include us as well?’
‘They don’t want old people like us at their party,’ Catherine said.
‘Anyway, you said you didn’t want to go,’ Mauro said. ‘Do you mind if we go?’
Catherine flushed. She hated bad manners more than anything, David always believed; it was a blessing she didn’t always notice it, when it happened. Small snubs, small jibes, the raised eyebrow and the moment of being ignored; she was always ready to overlook that, to find excuses for neighbours, fellow workers at the charity desk at the cathedral, acquaintances and even strangers at the bus stop. ‘They’ve got a lot of troubles,’ she would observe, or ‘They’re very busy.’ But Mauro clearly had no troubles; he was not busy; he was their guest for the weekend and, his eyes shining like plastic with the coke he’d taken, his request to go and find something more amusing was not something David’s mother could ignore.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It sounds like fun. Anyway, I hadn’t made much in the way of plans for dinner. No, you go. Enjoy yourselves.’
Alec was making a good deal of noise in the kitchen.
30.
‘Well done,’ Calvin said. ‘Ever so well done. They’ll think, Ooh, must have Mr and Mrs Calvin back, they’re ever so entertaining, full of conversation, especially her. I. Don’t. Think. Standing there like one of the elect, like a bleeding duchess. Disapproving look on your silly face like you could smell rotting fish. Or dog droppings.’
‘That’s not fair, John,’ Laura said. They were walking down the Strand towards their house. Calvin was carrying a woven hessian bag-for-life in which there was a bottle of Spanish cava. They had brought it, just in case it was the same sort of party that Calvin gave, the sort where people brought bottles of Spanish cava and were expected to—in fact, the bottle in Calvin’s planet-saving bag had been brought to them by an only marginally less mean guest, and been set on one side. But they had come through the door, and Calvin had seen that there was champagne in the kitchen. He had placed the bottle in the bag, underneath the telephone table in the hallway, to pick it up without comment on their way out, as if they always brought their shopping to parties. ‘That’s not fair. Not everyone finds parties as easy as you do.’
‘You’ve had plenty of opportunities, my girl,’ Calvin said. ‘Oh, yes, begorrah and Goddammit, that you have. The parties I’ve taken you to. The festivities you’ve adorned. Over the years so to speak.’
‘John, not in the street,’ Laura said.
‘And you still can’t bring yourself to show an interest in other people, just standing there like a prize turnip. Do you know what you look like, standing there with your mouth open? Some great white root vegetable, that’s what. Why do you think people ask us out? Do you think it’s because of you, standing there with your great silly look and saying nothing? It’s just selfishness, that’s what it is, what you call your shyness. You see, I make an effort. You can see I do. And people want to have me, li’l ol’ me, at their parties, but you, they put up with you, no more’n that. And—’
Calvin’s commentary froze. Out of a silver car—a sleek silver Saab with a soft top—two men were stepping, both in sunglasses despite the half-light of the evening. Both had shaved heads, one with a trim ginger beard. One, slightly shorter, wore a skirt, a kilt, in combat material, and above, nothing but an arrangement of leather and steel, a sort of harness. The harness was tight about his flesh, perhaps bought when he was less fat, or fastened a notch too far; its side straps made capital Bs of his bulging waist, and about his peg-like nipples, the flesh was forced into breasts like rhomboid chicken flesh. His friend, less startling, wore leather trousers, folded and creased like an overfilled sofa and a black T-shirt with an obscure slogan on it. ‘You see?’ the kilted man said. ‘Right outside their house in the end.’ The car was locked, and they walked across the Strand, up Little Matcham Street. They hardly glanced at Calvin and Laura.
‘Gays,’ Laura said superfluously. ‘I heard those two say they had some friends coming round. That’s why they left early.’
‘Disgraceful,’ Calvin said. ‘Walking the streets like that. There could have been—’
‘There could have been anyone,’ Laura said.
‘It’s practically a matter for Neighbourhood Watch,’ Calvin said.
31.
The table had been cleared, but most of the dishes had only got as far as the work surface just inside the kitchen; it had been cleared in a hurry. It was two hours later. The curtains were pulled tight: Harry had sometimes suggested that, on the Bears’ evenings, they might be fastened tight with clothes pegs, but nothing had been done, and Harry accepted that he was being too nervous about the neighbours. On the table—a four-pinioned mahogany Victorian structure, as solid as a dining-table could possibly be, resting on voluted and square-legged pillars—a man lay on his back with his knees flexed, his head backwards over the edge, his face inverted. This was Spencer. On the floor, lying on the carpet, another man, his position echoing Spencer’s, on the table, but his legs stretched straight upwards, his hands gripping the back of his knees. This was Mauro. Like everyone else in the room, they were naked, though Mauro had left on a pair of white socks. They were now twitching in the air like an upside-down pirouette with the forceful rhythm of what was happening to him at either end. Almost everything that could be occupied was occupied; a bottle of poppers was doing the rounds, passing from Ali, who was fucking Spencer with a steady, circular, andante rhythm, to Spencer, who took his face away from Harry’s inquisitive, craning, rhubarb-pink cock to sniff the bottle; left nostril, right nostril, and then, dangerously, held underneath the open mouth and a deep breath. Harry took it from him, and ladled his balls once more into Spencer’s mouth; he sniffed once, twice, and, like Spencer, a third time, before passin
g it over his shoulder to Steve, who with a businesslike snap stretched and dropped a condom on the solid trunk of his cock, Viagra-sustained, jabbed twice before forcing it into Harry, who let out a slightly rehearsed groan; Steve bit Harry’s ear from behind, licked his neck affectionately, and then started up a rhythm of his own, sniffing from time to time as it went on. Underneath, there was a hand cupped confidently, encouragingly, under Steve’s motion into Harry; it turned out to be Robert’s hand, or perhaps, underneath him, Kevin’s.
King of the Badgers Page 29
